Expatriates and those who have fled the war were casting their ballots at dozens of Syrian embassies abroad ahead of next week's vote inside the country that opponents have dismissed as a farce as the fighting rages in its fourth year.

Several countries that oppose Assad, including France, have blocked the voting but Syrian government media said people were still able to participate in many countries.

Reuters would continue with anecdotal, unsubstantiated reports to undermine the legitimacy of the elections before reporting:

The European Union has said holding an election "in the midst of conflict, only in regime-controlled areas and with millions of Syrians displaced from their homes would be a parody of democracy, have no credibility whatsoever, and undermine efforts to reach a political solution".

"Holding elections in the midst of conflict, only in regime-controlled areas" being a "parody of democracy" and therefore having "no credibility whatsoever" might have been a credible assessment by the European Union if it hadn't just fully endorsed as credible, elections in Ukraine held under precisely the same conditions. Indeed, the EU along with the US and rest of NATO, hailed recent elections in Ukraine as a success and immediately recognized pro-Western billionaire oligarch Petro Poroshenko as the new "president" of Ukraine.

However, the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe's (OSCE) own report cited as proof that elections were "in line with international commitments and with a respect for fundamental freedoms," in fact reveals the exact same conditions inside of Ukraine the EU claims make the Syrian elections a "parody."

In the report, it admits that elections were not held at all in Crimea and nearly no voting occurred in the eastern most oblasts of Donetsk and Luhansk. In the west where the only semblance of voting took place, the OSCE report admits opposition parties were regularly harassed, assaulted, and even driven from campaigning before the May 25 polls. And even as polls took place, the regime in Kiev was overseeing ongoing military operations in the east of the country that included armored vehicles, helicopters and even air raids.

What the OSCE describes during Ukraine's recent elections is quite a "parody of democracy." In fact, the elections in Ukraine are more of a parody in documented reality than what the EU claims are taking place in Syria.

Video: Ukrainian presidential candidate Oleg Tsarev was savagely beaten outside a TV studio after an interview for the Ukrainian talk show, 'Svoboda Slova.’ Systematic and violent intimidation across the west of Ukraine made it difficult if not impossible for opposition to the Nazi regime in Kiev to campaign.

In Syria, the legitimate government of the country, which has ruled Syria for decades, is steering the nation back into order after years of deadly destabilization organized from abroad. The victor of the conflict and the territorial integrity of Syria is not in question. In Ukraine, elections were organized by violent usurpers who ousted the elected government in a bloody coup spearheaded by literal Neo-Nazis. They then launched military campaigns against the rest of the country in a bid to consolidate power before organizing rushed elections for the sole purpose of legitimizing their otherwise illegitimate unelected grip on power.

However, the regime in Kiev was unable to consolidate power before May 25 and in fact, the country is so divided, operations in the east look more like a foreign military occupation than internal policing. The EU's decision to uphold Ukraine's elections is an attempt to lend Kiev badly needed legitimacy ahead of continued and more intensified efforts to consolidate power. That the EU in turn is not only condemning Syria's elections, but actively blocking Syrians abroad from voting, illustrates the overall lack of legitimacy of the European Union itself. It also calls into question the myriad of institutions it uses to prop up such self-serving, biased policies.

And while the EU's hypocrisy swings wildly across the two most extreme ends of the spectrum, there is one common denominator between its position regarding elections in Ukraine and Syria. Both positions, for and against elections, help perpetuate campaigns of mass murder backed by the West in pursuit of its extraterritorial interests. In Ukraine, the Kiev regime's assault on the nation's east is fully backed by the West with many members of NATO already providing material support to ongoing operations. In Syria, since 2007, the West conspired to use sectarian extremists both inside Syria's borders and beyond them, to overthrow the government in Damascus. In 2011, this conspiracy was fully realized in a deadly conflict that has killed tens of thousands and left parts of Syria in ruins.

By preventing elections from moving ahead in Syria that would grant President Bashar al-Assad a renewed mandate or place into office another candidate who had rejected armed militancy, the West can continue portraying the conflict as a popular uprising, continue destabilizing the country, and perhaps even successfully push forward the "political transition" (read: regime change) it had sought since at least as early as 2007.

The West has managed to weaponize humanitarian aid in Syria, and now, even the concept of voting as a means to perpetuate bloodshed and geopolitical instability. While the West cites an ever increasing list of threats that endanger global stability it must rise to confront, it is clear that they themselves have become the masters of turning anything and everything into a source of contention and protracted, deadly violence - even elections. Tony Cartalucci, Bangkok-based geopolitical researcher and writer, especially for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”.